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Last month, before last Sunday's fire, my girlfriend and I nervously parked our Honda amongst all the giant lifted macho trucks at the Camino Cielo shooting range to break up the monotony of our peaceful and earthy tour of the mountaintop. I had been up there before (years ago), but never noticed the sheer massiveness of the mess. The whole hillside was covered in shot-up junk (TV's, matresses, thousands of beer bottles, cans, sofas, and piles of shells and cartridges ).

There were probably 15 or so people shooting. We saw a young kid with his dad and uncle letting their shotgun off, a bunch of late-teen-early 20somethings (who reminded me a little too much of some of the more scary kids I knew in Boy Scouts), and some other dudes with mustaches that I wasn't about to look at for too long.

Once we got over the loudness of some of the guns and the contrast between the beautiful hillside and the shell strewn ground, we noticed that there was a very distinct etiquette. Every 30 min or so, someone would call a time-out, and everyone would go calmly out into the range and re-set their targets. We watched for another 45 min or so and then drove off into the mist..

I'm still formulating an opinion about how I feel about our local shooting range culture, but if that fire the other day was indeed caused by some irresponsible target practice, I'd be a little ticked. The trash is kind of a turn off too. Some of the pictures on Edhat, seem to show a much cleaner 'post-fire' shooting range.